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Women in Science

Publishing results

Video clip: Angela has found changing disciplines from chemistry to biology brought a new appreciation of the peer-review process.

What's your experience been like of getting published?

So that's an interesting question because… as a chemist actually I came through my training publishing in chemistry journals and it's a very different experience, publishing chemistry research to publishing chemical biology to publishing biology. And in chemistry it tends to be you're in, you're out, if you're in there's very little things, very few suggestions that are made and people accept… I guess because it is more black and white, the results are not, perhaps, open to interpretation in the same way as they are in a biological study.

So it was a fundamental shock to me when I started publishing research in biological journals because you would suddenly get reviewers comments that were reams [laughter] of pages long and actually I've come to appreciate it a great deal because I think it's a hugely important part of the process that makes you understand your science much better. I've heard others say this as well and I certainly agree with it. That the referee process could offer you insights into your own work that you simply haven't thought about, and offer explanations that you perhaps hadn't considered. So I think I'd like to see more of that in chemistry publishing, I have to say that it hasn't happened yet [laughter].